


A Blessing Count in Funeral Toll

by penitence_road



Category: Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas - Ursula K. Le Guin, 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen, Omelas-Typical Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28185084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penitence_road/pseuds/penitence_road
Summary: How is one to tell about joy?  How to describe the citizens of Omelas?  One thing I know there is none of is guilt.(All For One takes Omelas's bet.)
Relationships: Sensei | All For One & Shigaraki Tomura | Shimura Tenko
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	A Blessing Count in Funeral Toll

**Author's Note:**

  * For [codename_sazanka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/codename_sazanka/gifts).



> Who had a very rousing conversation with me a few months back about the idea of villains as scapegoats, and Shigaraki specifically as a child who will bring the world that ignored him quite a lot of destruction indeed, and all because he was shown a kindness instead of being left to die. Merry Christmas, Nal!

He hears tell of it from a man in distant Koya, of the secret stone, the pit at the heart of fragrant, fleshy Omelas. That beautiful city, whose glittering harbors and bright towers are renowned across many lands; that peaceful city, with its well-loved Festival of Summer and its poignant songs.

 _There is a child,_ is the whisper, haunted by the memory of a great stain. _And knowing of the child, I could not stay._

“Yet knowing of the child, you left?” the man called the Teacher asks, and grins, wolf-wide, at the shudder of the one who walked away.  
  


* * *

  
The child huddles in squalor. It does not yet know what is coming. It has not yet forgotten what it lost.  
  


* * *

  
The Teacher comes to Omelas in the winter. Frost glitters in the city’s eaves and scents of sugar-roasting almonds and mulled wine sprawl through its streets like banners unfurling. Lamps gleam honeyed gold and the people of Omelas are merry and warm despite their seaside city’s windy, hibernal chill. In one corner of a bustling market, a piper plays carols for the equinox, the melody larksong-sweet. If there is darkness in the corners of the city, it is nothing more sinister than the long shadows of the season.

The Teacher smiles, sips at a candle-warmed glass of brandy, and asks the bartender where he might inquire about renting a room.  
  


* * *

  
The child curls beneath a tattered blanket—too thin to be a kindness, its presence only barest necessity—and sucks feebly at its fingers. The warmth of its mouth is the only heat to be found in the room, yet still its fingertips throb with cold.

It had a pet once, a dog, that would jump onto the bed and lay alongside him (for the child had been a him once, before it became the city’s dreadful keystone), a lazy, solid block of tawny-furred warmth. The child curls tighter, mind groping for the memory of such simple comforts, that the ghosts might carry him through another night.  
  


* * *

  
The winter cyclamen still bloom in Omelas’s well-tended gardens when the Teacher first asks to see the child.

“The child?” the woman setting a bottle of milk on his front stoop repeats, and then laughs—there is no cruelty to the sound, though there is, perhaps, a touch of rue. “The child! The child is a story, Teacher, told by those who envy us our plenty and our peace. They cannot conceive of a place existing in contentment and prosperity, as we do, without inventing some great injustice to lay at our feet. In our amity, we hold up a mirror to the world, and some people quite mislike their own reflections!”

“I see,” says the Teacher. “But their reflections are none of you?”

“Just so,” says the woman, and smiles. The Teacher returns the expression, mirror-perfect.

“I see.”  
  


* * *

  
(Away in the world, a discontent is stirring.)  
  


* * *

  
Spring comes to Omelas in a pageantry of ruffled sea lavender and amber-orange poppies brighter than the bees that flock to them, all diligent industriousness. Taking their example to heart, the Teacher makes his living by working at a newspaper office housed in the city’s northeastern streets, near his apartment. He does not write—though he has written before—but merely sets type, his broad fingers fleet and clever as they dance across the wooden compartments housing the leaden alphabet. The work has him up in the gossamer hours, the still time before sunrise; twice a week, he returns to the galleys in the afternoon to set the evening edition.

It has been many years since the Teacher performed such commonplace labor; he finds the work novel, for all that the hard, sharp edges of the type rub calluses into his fingertips. A fellow typesetter nods in sympathy when he finds the Teacher sucking at a blister and recommends him a salve of aloe and steeped green tea. He thanks the man and asks after his family, his daughter who is soon to be wed, and listens with a ready laugh to the answer.

Omelas is full of such little, joyous tales, the Teacher has found. He makes note of them, both the stories he hears and the stories he builds letter on letter, makes note of the way Omelas—fair Omelas!—treasures its happiness while shaking its head at the woes of the wider world. The city is not without sympathy (for its people are not a cruel people), but it is without guilt. Guilt does not dwell in Omelas, the Teacher marvels; its people value but do not covet beauty, esteem but do not sanctify labor. They hold each life, and each measure of life, in high but practical regard.

“When did you last see the child?” he asks his compatriot one day over coffee and, when the man jests that any grandchild who came so quickly would be winning the Summer races as soon as they could walk, shakes his head. “I meant _the_ child.”

“…I would rather not linger on such misery,” the man says at last. “Let me raise my own children well, that that poor soul’s suffering should not be wasted.”

Perhaps the Teacher looks unconvinced (or perhaps the typesetter merely thinks him so), for he shakes his head in turn. “You will understand if you stay here. We are able to live as we do because _all_ of us live as we do.”

The Teacher hums and takes another sip of his coffee.  
  


* * *

  
The child in the cellar is trying to remember the color blue. It once preferred red—it was wearing red shoes that were torn roughly away from its feet on that first terrible night it was brought here. It remembers that detail more clearly now than the faces of its family as they watched their son being led away. Had they been weeping then? The child knows its own weeping, a grief and loneliness that choke out breath and voice alike, that sap what little strength it has and leave it trembling, its entire body’s function overhauled to better suit the expression of misery. The child knows its own weeping, and it remembers nothing of _that_ in its family from that final night.

They must not have wept, it thinks.

Red. The color red is easy. Its red shoes, yes, but also the raw welts on its skin, or the color that blooms beneath its nails when it scratches and scratches and _scratches_ until its own skin joins in the weeping. It all but breathes the knowledge of red.

But blue… The sky is blue—it remembers being told that by an old woman who lived with its family, back when… It was told that once, but it no longer remembers the meaning. The sky is blue, but what _is_ blue? The skies in its memory are only white or dark now, an arching “above” that is by turns too bright or blind black.

Even the black, it thinks, is slowly turning red.  
  


* * *

  
The Teacher lowers himself into a crouch, wiping his brow. The stride of the hours lengthens day by day, the dainty footsteps of the early spring widening into the loping gait of summer, and the weather has turned accordingly warm. The festival to welcome the season will be in less than a week, and all over the city—his own little flat now no exception—garlands of jasmine and oleander decorate the eaves of buildings and perfume the air with drowsy sweetness; strings of pennants and swallow-tailed flags stitch patchworks of color everywhere the eye might fall.

“Wonderful work!” his elderly neighbor congratulates him from the ground below. “Why, you might have been born here!”

The Teacher pauses for the barest of moments, affording himself a smile at the shining, sun-fired tiles of the roofs rolling away before him. He then descends the ladder with lithe ease and turns his back to lean against it.

“That is high praise,” he says, and peers down into the old man’s eyes. “But if that is truly so, then I would know the weight that those born of Omelas carry.

“I wish to see the child,” the Teacher says simply.

The smile falls off the elder’s face, but after a long time searching the Teacher’s face (and who knows what he finds there, in those mirror-bright eyes, be it understanding or sorrow), he nods.

“Last I saw it, it was underneath the library. It’s been a long time, but like as not it’s there where I left it. It or whichever of its poor heirs we’ve come to.”  
  


* * *

  
(Away in the world, the discontent is rising.)  
  


* * *

  
The child, the Teacher is told, is still kept beneath the Library, though there is talk of making a space for its eventual successor in a certain damp cellar nearer the sea.

“How long will it be before a successor is needed?” the Teacher asks as the custodians, each wearing a plain white sash across their shoulders, walk him down a clean but empty hall. A hush hangs on the air, the same thick union of fear and reverence as might be found at a memorial, at an altar, at a grave.

“The way this one hurts itself, I fear not long,” says one woman, and shakes her head with a sigh. “Perhaps another winter, unless it learns better.” The Teacher studies her, mimicking her pensive sorrow, and does not ask how she supposes that such turnabouts might come to pass.

The custodians leave him in the care of a single one of their number, a man who might be a similar age to his own (like to comfort like, perhaps) and who walks him to a small door, pulling a plain iron key out of his pocket.

“Remember,” the man tells him, “do not approach, and say no kindness.”

The Teacher nods and, smiling faintly, follows the custodian into the room.  
  


* * *

  
The door opens—the key in the lock is heavy, its sound impossible to mistake—and the child shies back from the light that intrudes into its well-accustomed dark. A familiar shape fills the doorway and a man walks in; the child knows this man for one who will kick, but not if it does not try to hide its face, and so it screws shut its eyes against the light but turns its face out for examination. Its hair, long gone white and thin, seems gray and bedraggled; its cheekbones all but cut the dark. It whines low in its throat like a hound, wordless, insistent, broken in time with its unsteady breaths.

Because its eyes are closed, it does not see the _second_ man step in behind the first.

It does, however, hear the door close, and this peels open its eyes once more, for the door never closes with another person still lingering in the room. It opens its eyes just in time to see the second man step crisp and quick to the custodian and tear the strip of cloth free from his shoulder, wrapping it twice, thrice, around his wrist such that its wearer’s arm is twisted too high behind his back, elbow straining at a wrong angle like a halfway-broken branch.

The custodian has barely opened his mouth to cry out when the strange man turns in place and slams him backward into the wall, which he slides down, leaving behind a red, red streak.

Cowering in the farthest corner, whimpered gasps seizing in its narrow, naked chest, the child stares at the sudden sharpness of the violence. When the new man turns to face it, it cringes back, raising its thin arms up to protect it. As footsteps draw nearer, cries tear lowly from its throat, “Ah, eh, nuh—!” for it has forgotten all but the body-memory of the language it once spoke.

The man crouches down before it, a shadow against the dark, and the child trembles with the effort of keeping still.

And then—a rustle of cloth, and the smell of clean cotton and an edge of something windswept and green as a coat settles heavy and warm on the child’s shoulders. Frozen in shock, it lets itself be gathered to the man’s chest, broad fingers cupping firm but gentle against its hair.

“There, there,” the man says. “There, there.”

The child—remembers. Remembers the woman it used to live with, who would hold it this way, the man it used to live with, who would run strong fingers over its hair and smile, the girl it used to live with, who would whisper into its ear, “There, there. There, there.”

Before the child can remember more, the tears rise up, drowning the faces from its past in the immediacy of grief and pain. It folds into the man’s chest, a thin, keening wail spilling out from between its lips, pulled up from its heart like cotton fibers drawn towards a spindle.

The Teacher holds the child close. It reeks of open sores and filth; unclothed but for his jacket, it weeps with a force that wracks its thin shoulders like walls on the verge of collapse. The wails modulate themselves into the babbled syllables of an infant in its earliest days of language, and then again into a scream, piercing and desolate, and still the Teacher only rubs a calming circle between the shoulder blades (stretched so sharp beneath pallid skin that they might nearly be mistaken for bare bone, for mounted horns gleaming above a lit hearth, though Omelas does not mount such trophies on its walls).

He does not worry that someone might come and discover that Omelas’s most inviolable rule has been shattered. After all, the only noise for the custodians to hear is the child screaming.

“They all knew of you,” he murmurs, and lets the hand stroking the child’s hair slip down to brace against its neck, which is ringed with self-inflicted scars. “They knew, and did nothing. The people here do not value gold and diamonds, so I cannot tell you that their wealth is mere pyrite and glass. But all the same, their joy is counterfeit—their happiness an overdrawn check. You do not understand these things yet, sorrowful one. But I will teach you.”

The boy (for the Teacher, at least, recognizes the child as such) sags against him, strength drained, his breath catching in muffled sobs, and does not resist when the Teacher tucks one arm beneath his knees and lifts his meager weight from the unswept floor. At the sound of a low groan, he turns to the custodian, who strains to regather his senses.

“What—what have you done?” the man whispers, a horror as deep as the deepest of the nine seas in his voice as he stares up at the two of them, the Teacher and the child, in the dark.

“What have I done? I wonder,” the Teacher muses. For a moment, in only what little light spills through from beneath the door, his eyes gleam. “Let us say I taken the other side of your city's wager. We shall all have to see what comes of it.”

“You—you must not leave—the child must not leave!” The man staggers to his feet, stumbles towards them. The Teacher lifts one hand, easy and poised, and catches the custodian’s wrist, pulling it over his own shoulder, his intent to drag the man into his raising knee, driving the breath from him once more.

And then the boy shrieks—grasping, however faintly, that the warmth he has so suddenly regained is under threat—and leans forward, planting two white hands on the custodian’s chest.

It should not make a difference. There is no strength in the child, what little he once possessed long since drawn away into the dark. It should have no more effect than the brush of an insect’s wing.

And yet.

The custodian chokes, a breath seizing in his throat, and falls backward. He falls, and his gasping becomes gurgling, and he does not stand again.

“Hmm,” says the Teacher, and walks over to open the door.

In the light that spills once more into the room (the boy whines and hides his face), the Teacher studies, for a long moment, the pair of inky palm prints that glisten on the custodian’s shirt, watches the crawl of black tendrils seeping outward from what should not be wounds, eating away at cloth and skin, a slow devouring that fills the air with a fresh, wet reek of decay. The custodian’s eyes bulge wide, glassy and sightless in the shadows.

The Teacher hums to himself as the child begins, once more, to shiver and cry in his arms. Whatever his thoughts may be, he does not speak them aloud, but merely steps out into the hall, the child cradled in his arms and the door left carelessly open behind him.  
  


* * *

_  
Away in the world, the discontent awakens. Questions take root in the minds of Omelas’s neighbors. Why does Omelas, bounteous in blessings, hoard its abundance so? How can so fair and fortunate a sovereignty feel so little responsibility to the world community?_

_Rumors spread—there is a jewel, there is a tree, there is a child, there is a mirror—and the rumors say that the heart of Omelas is responsible for all of its prosperity. Covetousness, resentfulness, indignance—absent from Omelas, still they are turned towards it._

_A boy hears of the rumors and thinks, I hate those people who hide their wickedness behind fair seemings. I would that they would all burn._

_A girl listens to the talk and thinks, I hear the fruit of Omelas is the sweetest on Earth. I should like to taste it myself someday._

_A man remembers a child from long ago and thinks, he was my twin and I walked away. I might as well have put the knife to myself. I have to make it right._

_Away in the world, the child grows.  
  
_

* * *

  
There is on the outskirts of Omelas a graveyard. This in itself is not strange—Omelas has many a stately cemetery, green in the summer and snow-still in the winter, all well-tended, for the people of Omelas love even those who have left them, and well-know the value of quietude and remembrance. Their memorial stones are washed clean of moss, the grass over the plots kept neatly trimmed. Loved ones visit to pay their respects, allowing the bright breezes off the sea to soothe away their grief and whisper of paths not yet taken.

 _This_ cemetery is well-tended, but there the resemblance to those other places of rest ends.

It is seldom visited, for those who lie beneath its hard soil are those whose loved ones said their goodbyes long before the interred passed on. The stones are unmarked save for the sign of the city, for the only ones buried here are those whose names were stripped from them. It knows no green, for what trees its caretakers in their white sashes have ever planted there wither to black within a year of their roots touching the fallow earth.

The lost children of Omelas can know no comfort in life; try though their minders may to grant them kindness in death, the efforts come to nothing in the end. Some take this as evidence that such mercies would be wasted on them in life as well, for no hale fruit can come of such ill seed.

The man who visits the graveyard today has a different hypothesis.

“The effect is weak because they are already beyond the veil, but their presence is inimical to life—at least, to Omelas’s life. Yet they did not possess such a power before their time imprisoned, nor did it manifest in those dark places. Only after.” The Teacher looks towards the child, who he named, in that first year after their departure, Mourning. “It was the same for you, was it not?”

Since the last time he drew breath in this city, the child has gained new scars, for sometimes his power burns beneath his skin, and the only thing of Omelas there is to hate, in the far-distant cities he and the Teacher travel to, is him. Still, for all his physical similarities, the custodians would not recognize him now, for where that nameless child cowered and mewled, Mourning meets peoples’ eyes with stubborn challenge and speaks in a voice forever scored with defiant pride.

Now, he nods absently in response to his Teacher’s question and kneels in front of one of the small stones, indifferent to the thought of bones beneath him. He reaches out and traces one finger over the city’s sigil, his expression equally hard and cold.

This would, he knows, have been his fate as well, lying in the earth and cursing Omelas for its belated mercies. The only difference between these children and him is that Mourning escaped before that room killed him—that the kindness he was shown came before death, rather than after. That is why his power is so much stronger than theirs.

The power reaches through him now as he presses his hand more fully to the stone, an inescapable remembrance of terror and want, a cold that has never left his bones, a seed of helpless hatred that, though planted in darkness, could only bloom when it was brought into the light.

The grave marker crumbles beneath his touch, a brief mar of black left behind that collapses even as the stone does, leaving nothing but a dark gray sludge on the barren ground. He stands and moves on to the next as the Teacher watches, amusement pulling his lips into an uneven smile.

Left to die in the dark, Mourning never could have grasped the enormity of it—a contrast with no context is meaningless. The child taught the people of Omelas how to count their blessings, numbering them in wheezing breaths and sharp recoils. So too the totality of Mourning’s hatred requires that he learn the names for each perfectly sculpted treasure and every ephemeral joy that once hung suspended from his naked spine. His urge to destroy would scatter, aimless and futile, without the specific knowledge of that which others purchased with his suffering.

When the boy stands, the last of the headstones rendered down to a slurry of dark dust like rotting meal, the Teacher reaches out a hand to him. He does so without fear—not of Omelas-born, the curse of the child has time and time again passed him over without so much as a shiver of aftershock—and, with a smile, speaks.

“I have told you much of Omelas, Mourning. Where would you like to go first?”

The boy stands, frowning to himself as he considers the question. His own memories of the city of his birth are misshapen, unreliable, but his Teacher is gifted with words, has often spun him tales of the grand festivals, of the open-air markets and the museums, of the marvelous schools of sciences and arts. He can list his Teacher’s favorites of Omelas’s profusion of cafés and restaurants; he can picture the golden ripeness of fecund farmlands and the variegated banners and bright sails of the ships moored at the quay. He knows the toll of the morning bells in melody and in meter, used to lie awake listening to his mentor humming warm refrains of haunting familiarity from a time before the dark.

“The train station,” he says at last. “And then the stables and the paddocks.” He looks up at the Teacher, a terrible smile pulling his lips rictus-taut. “If they think they will escape from Omelas, then I would have them walk.”


End file.
